Science – Post-normal perspectives

Abstract

In May 2019 a seminar at the Oxford Martin School, celebrated my 90th birthday.The proceedings were organised around four themes, and I prepared preliminary notes for each. They are reproduced here. (1) How will the essential fiduciary status of science be preserved, when it is absorbed into STEMM, and threatened internally by the ‘irreproducibility crisis’ and externally by the populist rejection of elitist expertise? (2) As Post-Normal Science becomes a movement of ‘informed critical resistance’,how will it distinguish between real science done by good citizens and pseudo-science done by bad populists? (3) Policy-related mathematics is infected by fallacious statistical inferences, patently unfalsifiable simulation models, spuriously quantified indicators of quality, and sorcerer’s-apprentice algorithms. How can our scientific culture be weaned from its teddy-bear numbers? (4) The prospectus to the PNS5 symposium, held at the University of Florence in September 2020, has the title:Knowledge, Science Practices and Integrity: Quality through Post-Normal Science Lenses. It concludes: “Confronting issues at the science-technology-policy interface with PNS lenses yields something more rigorously managed than politics, less precise than laboratory science, more challenging than either of them, and with the potential to restore integrity to science practice and prudence in policy advice.”